Gaffer-Tape Engineering : Gaffer

TFS Backup to Live Mesh

Jason Neave — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:03:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking about the “little guys” of late and solutions not always available to the small dev groups, offsite backup being one of these. Windows Live Mesh is a solution I’m using for my photo library as the Live Desktop has 5GB of online storage available, all you need to do is set a folder to sync to it.

So, “how can I sync TFS backup’s to Live Mesh?” you cry! Easy.

Follow this guide to set up a maintenance plan for the TFS databases and specify the folder you want them to be backed up to. Once complete, add the specified folder to Live Mesh to grab the contents of that folder every time a new file is added or updated.

Job done.

One thing to bare in mind when setting this up is the legal ramifications of backing up your data to 3rd party servers. For the hobbyist this isn’t really an issue however for professionals or other parties with business concerns you should look into the legal aspects of hosting your IP in such a manner.

Legal shenanigans aside, enjoy!

Jason

Useful Links

Jason Neave — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:04:00 GMT

This post is more for myself than anyone, it is a collection of links difficult to find that are nevertheless very useful. If they can help others as well then all the better.

Team Foundation Server

Customizable Team Foundation Build Targets
Team Foundation Build Tasks
Team Build 2008 Build Definitions

Windows Home Server

We Got Served

More to be added over time and feel free to add yours to the comments, I'll add them to the list if useful :)

Regards,
Jason

Win32 Error Codes and HRESULT Definitions

Jason Neave — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:08:00 GMT

Not the snappiest of titles though if you are debugging Win32 applications, COM servers or just see a random error code in your event log these two mapges may be of help...

HRESULT Values
Win32 Error Codes

I'll try and come up with something more interesting for the next post...

Jason

Virtual Server and Differencing Disks

Jason Neave — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:28:00 GMT

Another trick I use in Virtual Server is the use of differencing disks. A differencing disk is one that inherits it's contents from a parent disk, a powerful tool when used to the ful. For example, I have a blank installation of Windows Server 2003 SP2 on a VHD. I have set that VHD to be read only and use it as a parent disk for a number of virtual machines. NOTE: I'm not a licencing expert, make sure if you follow these steps you have licences for all the virtual machines.

How To Create a Differencing Disk

In the Virtual Server website under "Virtual Disks" hover over "Create" then click "Differencing Virtual Hard Disk". Enter the location of the differencing disk you want to create in the top box and select the parent disk you wish to use from the bottom box. Job done.

From here create a new machine using the newly created hard disk. A very easy way to create junk machines for testing, if you mess one up delete it and create another.

Regards,
Jason

How To: Failover a Mirrored Data Tier when the Principle Data-Tier is Not Available

Jason Neave — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:02:00 GMT

Recently I've been working on SQL mirroring with TFS and concentrating on worst case scenarios, when the principle data tier goes down. The whole point of mirrors with TFS, as I understand it, is high availability. With regards to setting up mirroring for your data tier I the documentation is quite clear (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa980629.aspx) however the articles for fail-over are not.

The official documentation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa980528.aspx) for failing over when the principle data tier isn't available, think worst case and server down, is not great. When I tried to follow this through I had no luck, things did not go well. To that end I came up with my own solution, it was a lot quicker than following the official documentation and it works. In server down scenarios time is of the essence.

The following steps are a guide only, please don't see this is a stone set guide and certainly don't rely on this for production. I would say use this as a base, test it thoroughly in staging and once you're comfortable do as you wish. I've also only tested this with TFS 2008 and SQL Server 2005 SP2, as most of the work is in SQL I believe this guide will hold true for TFS 2005 but some steps will vary a little.

You will need to set up an alias on the mirror so that connections referencing the principle will not be rejected. To do this follow these steps;

Connect to the mirror and open “SQL Server Configuration Manager”, expand the “SQL Native Client Configuration” and right click on “Aliases”. Click on “New Alias” and enter the following information;

Alias Name: <hostname of the principle data tier>

Port Number: 1433 <may be different on your setup however this is default>

Protocol: TCP/IP

Server: <hostname of mirror>

Then click on OK.

To failover follow these steps;

1. Connect to the mirror and run the following script, if your WSS databases are named differently you may need to change those entries;

ALTER DATABASE ReportServer SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE ReportServerTempDB SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE TfsActivityLogging SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE TfsBuild SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE TfsIntegration SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE TfsVersionControl SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE TfsWarehouse SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE TfsWorkItemTracking SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE TfsWorkItemTrackingAttachments SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE WSS_AdminContent SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE WSS_Config SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

ALTER DATABASE WSS_Content SET PARTNER FORCE_SERVICE_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS

Please note, if one of these entries fail then you will need to remove those that succeeded before the failure.

2. Open the hosts file on the application tier

a. C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts (no file extension)

b. Add a reference forwarding the hostname of the principle to the IP address of the mirror

c. Save the changes

3. Open a command prompt and run “ipconfig /flushdns” and “iisreset”

4. Run the following command on the application tier;
setupwarehouse –o –s MirrorDT –d TfsWarehouse –c warehouseschema.xml –ra TFSReportAccount –a TfsServiceAccount –mturl http://at:8080

5. Once complete, connect to Analysis Services on the mirror using SQL Server Management Studio, browse to TfsWarehouse, right click then “Process”. This may take some time to complete as it is rebuilding the TfsWarehouse from historic data, wait for the processing to complete

6. Open “Reporting Services Configuration Manager”

a. Click on “Database Setup”

b. In server name, enter the name of the mirror then click apply then connect

7. Open the report manager website (http://apptier/reports) and change both the connection strings such that they point to the mirror rather than the principle data tier

Done, from here you should be back up and running. The benefit of the above is that once you get your principle DT back up and running it is a little easier to switch back. I haven't test this fully yet though and will update this once I have.

Comments welcomed!

Regards,
Jason

My New Toy: Windows Media Centre

Jason Neave — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:43:00 GMT

I've had an old warhorse of a machine serving my media needs for some years and now I am moving house and will be moving back to Freeview so I thought I would build a new Media Centre machine based around Vista Ultimate. To that end I've sourced and thrown together the following parts;

Silverstone ML02 Micro-ATX case
Gigabyte 780G Series Motherboard
AMD 4600 AM2+ Processor
2GB DDR2 RAM
500GB Seagate HDD
Slimline DVD-ROM

The ultimate aim of this system is to view HD content, the motherboard I am using has HDMI onboard and those onboard graphics are capable of DX10 which is nice. The HDMI port also supports HDCP which will allow me to upgrade the DVD-ROM drive to a Blu-ray drive at some point in the future, an easy choice now the format debate is over. The motherboard also supports PCI-E which I will be filling with the Blackgold 6-in-1 Tuner card, on a sinle card you get dual analogue, digital terestrial and digital sattelite and as Freesat (www.freesat.co.uk) has just been released in the UK with the promise of free HD content from the BBC, ITV, ~~Channel 4~~ and a few others this choice is a no brainer.
Update: Channel 4 HD will be BSkyB only, no news on Freesat yet though likely it will move over at some point.

So far I've only played some HD content freely available online, a few trailers for example and a program released under Creative Commons whose name eludes me but the picture quality is astounding, definetly the way forward! It has to be said, with the new interface and improved hardware spec the addition I am most happy with is the remote. Until now I have been using a wireless keyboard, somewhat unwieldy to say the least, and being able to use a remote is a blessing. It also plays ball quite happily with my Home Server.

The last thing to note is the power requirements of this new machine. The board and processor I chose are based on mobile technology, to that end they are quite efficient devices. I borrowed a power meter from a friend of mine to test the power usage and while watching HD content from the hard disc it used a mere 60 Watts. Considering that most standard lightbulbs in the UK are of a similar rating and a less entertaining to watch I would say this is a hell of a result. The tuner card should add around 9 Watts to this however I will be replacing the hard disk with a WD Green Power disk that runs at 7 Watts so that should even things out quite nicely.

More news as I play around with it more.
Jason

Testing TFS in a Virtual Environment

Jason Neave — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:02:00 GMT

I've been a long standing proponent of virtual environments, for creating isolated test environments or sandboxing test rigs they simply can't be beaten. To that end I thought I would share some of the tricks I have used with the many virtual servers I have running under my desk at work that make creating TFS test rigs that little bit more bearable.

Active Directory
In order to have a dual tier or clustered setup for TFS a domain is required, rather than using your production domain setup a simple test domain. I always create a DC with two network cards, one connected to a loopback adapter (see below) which allows access to a share on the host machine. This is handy for moving files into the virtual domain.

Loopback
To make transferring files to the virtual domain that bit easier I would suggest you create a loopback network in Virtual Server. To do this in 2003/XP open the control panel on the host machine and open the "Add New Hardware" wizard. Select "Hardware is connected" then "Add new hardware device". Choose "install the hardware I manually select", choose "Network Adapters" then "Microsoft" and "Loopback Adapter". Open the properties for this new adapter and set the IP address to a static address in one of the private address spaces, I used 10.240.0.1 for example. Open the Virtual Server master status page and add a new network. Name it "Loop Back" or similar and choose the new loopback adapter from the drop down box then click ok. Choose to configure the newly created virtual network then click on "DHCP Server" and enter the following or similar settings;

Network Address: 10.240.0.0
Network Mask: 255.255.0.0
Starting IP: 10.240.0.50
Ending IP: 10.240.0.99
Virtual DHCP Server Address: 10.240.0.1

Then click ok. From now on, any time you create a new machine you can add it to the loopback network, it will automatically get an IP address and by using \\10.240.0.1 (or whatever static IP you assigned) your guest machines will be able to access the host machine.

Shared Setups
Assuming you have your DC running one trick I like to use it a shared setups disk attached to the DC. I have a virtual network for the guest machines only and only the DC is connected to loopback, from here I have created a large virtual disk and added it as a second disk to the DC. I then copied the setup files for TFS, SQL, et all, to this large virtual disk and shared it from the DC so that all the guests have access.

Those are my "Virtual Server Essentials" as it were and make virtual environments that bit easier to work with. I hope these are of use to someone!

Thanks,
Jason

Foldershare and Warcraft Addons

Jason Neave — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:38:00 GMT

So, my name is Jason and I play World of Warcraft. Shock, horror, etc... The problem is that I play WoW on my Mac and on my laptop when I am out and about. As with most players I have amassed quite a collection of AddOns since I started playing and keeping them up to date on both machines is a bit of a hassle, the fact I use AddOns which track my game play keeping the data synced manually would be even worse.

Foldershare helps out here, as the AddOns and settings files are platform neutral simply copying the files between machines will maintain the data and thanks to Foldershare this can be done automatically.

For this you will need two libraries in Foldershare, synchronising the "WoW\Interface\AddOns" and the "WoW\WTF\Accounts\USERNAME" folders. In my case I used my Home Server as a third party machine so as soon as I finish playing the files are updated on the server, when I log on to my laptop the files there are synced. Would work with just two machines but you would have to be careful as if files were edited on both machines there may be issues with conflicts...

Still, the principle is sound and will likely work with save games and similar for other games.

Remember, Enjoy Warcraft Responsibly...

Jason

EDIT: Should probably have added a link for Foldershare in here somewhere... www.foldershare.com
Also, if your AddOns save information about thier position then if you have different resolutions you may have to tweak things a little.

My Home Server Upgrade

Jason Neave — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:16:00 GMT

I recently decided to take the plunge and decided my home server really deserved a case rather than running on my dining room table so invested in new hardware for my Home Server. I also upgraded from the 1GHz workhorse I was using to an almighty 1.2GHz system. The difference is amazingly underwhelming, a testament to the low requirements of WHS I guess.

Jetway J7F4 Mainboard
1GB RAM
2TB Storage

Western Digital Green Power 1TB
2x Maxtor 500GB

Chenbro WHS Case
SATA PCI Card (2xSATA)

I found these at mini-itx.com (other retailers available). The impressive thing is the Jetway is fanless, runs at only 7W under full load and has dual gigabit ethernet. The Chenbro is also really easy to install the hardware considering the size of the case and pretty quiet too, the big decider is the drives you use though the Green Power discs barely vibrate while active and those too run at 7W under load. Between the mainboard and GP discs you could have a 4TB home server solution that runs at around 35W under full load. Truly astonishing considering most desktop PCs have ~500W power supplies as standard.

Bottom line if you want to go it alone and make your own WHS, I couldn't recommend the above any higher. For legal reasons the choice is yours however ;)

Jason

TFS Client API and 64bit Systems

Jason Neave — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:21:00 GMT

I had a case recently where a someone was trying to develop an application which used the TFS Client API to connect to TFS. The problem was that the target machine was 64bit and the assemblies are 32bit only. The workaround for this was to create a webservice that performed all the functions the application required related to TFS on behalf of the application and simply passed the data to the application.

As the application tier can only ever be 32bit this is an elegant solution as it centralises all the data access and gives the developer and TFS adminstrator control over what data gets to the application. I will admit that this may not be a workaround for everyone, though with the 32bit only assemblies something worth bearing in mind.

Jason

FolderShare + Home Server + OSX = WIN

Jason Neave — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:20:00 GMT

Not exactly a Home Server addin so I didn't add it to The List but I'm finding that FolderShare is yet another background service I can't live without for one very simple reason. OSX.

FolderShare is something Windows Live are currently working on and is in open beta. It allows you to set up distributed shared folders between various machines, including Mac's running OSX. You can find more information at www.foldershare.com

A couple of examples of where this is use are:-

"Home" Edition of Windows that doesn't have Offline Files, use FolderShare to keep a Sync'd copy of your share on WHS on your local machine
Sync Shares with OSX which has no offline file support, my OSX now maintains a sync'd copy of my Photos share for example
Create a shared folder between you and a friends machine, drop a file in a folder and it will automatically (settings depandant) be replicated to thier machines
Web access to your files from www.foldershare.com (requires host machine to be running for this)
Syncing of files between home and work machines. You can work on a file at home and drop it into a shared folder. It will be at work before you are.

...and so on.

If you can see the benefit of FolderShare then give it a go, if you have the need for something like this you wont be disapointed.
Jason

HomeServer Tomfoolery - Tips and Tricks

Jason Neave — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:21:00 GMT

So, finally got homeserver running on my ghetto setup. At the minute it consists of a VIA EPIA M10000 mainboard, 512MB RAM, two 500GB Seagate Baracuda's and a random power supply I had lying around. The case is notable by its absense, this is currently living on my dining room table.

Asides aside, it is running superbly. The borderline-obselete mainboard, it is only 1GHz afterall, is more than comforable with WHS running on it and the backup and remote access features are simply astounding.

Tips and Tricks

First things first, a few assumptions. Most home users have a single username and password combo that they use amongst thier home machines. ie "User" and "password" are the same across laptop and desktop. If you add a user to WHS with the same username/password combp you get to use something called passthrough authentication. This means that you will not have to supply credentials to WHS when connection from a machine on the same network.

Another useful tip is to set the location of your "special" folders to a share on your homeserver. For example, right click on your "My Pictures" folder in XP ("Pictures" in Vista) and select properties. One of the tabs should read "Location", set this to the following location replacing the placeholders as needed;

\\homeserver\Users\username\Pictures

If this folder doens't already exist it will ask you if you want to create it, it will then ask if you want to move the existing files to the new location. This will move all your pitcures to your personal folder within WHS under the "Pictures" folder. If you perform the same task on your other machines all of them will work against the same folder. It also automatically sets up Offline Files for this folder (Professional OS dependant, not available on Home Editions) and you will also be able to access these files by remote access.

~~This same principle can be used for your Music, Videos, Documents and Favourites folders. Probably a few others too but I haven't use for them.~~

Update: As the redirection above would result in frequent direct access to a share by programs on a client machine I have struck the text out as this is not recommended due to the data coruption bug;

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/946676

Once the bug is fixed then this method can be used once more though until then I would not recommend (nor use myself) the above.

Hope this helps, comments welcome!

Jason

It Begins...

Jason Neave — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 17:47:00 GMT

I've found myself more and more at a loss to find useful info online and have often ended up "giving it a go" and find my own solutions, usually by fixing things together with gaffer tape, physically or metaphorically. This includes building a home theatre system out of an old jukebox, teaching myself a few programming languages and making things innocuous into something useful.

I plan on writing down my successes, and more importantly my failures, in the hope it will help someone in some way.

With regards to the name, gaffer tape is similar to duct tape, though people tell me it is black rather than silver. Colour is irrelevant to me as longs as it does the job!

Jason